The impact of the introduction and use of an informational website on offline customer buying behavior

Do customers increase or decrease their spending in response to the introduction of an informational website? To answer this question, this study considers the effects of the introduction and use of an informational website by a large national retailer on offline customer buying behavior. More specifically, we study a website's effects on the number of shopping trips and the amount spent per category per shopping trip. The model is calibrated through the estimation of a Poisson model (shopping trips) and a type-II tobit model (the amount spent per category per shopping trip), with effect parameters that vary across customers. For the focal retailer, an informational website creates more bad than good news; most website visitors engage in fewer shopping trips and spend less in all product categories. The authors also compare the characteristics of shoppers who exhibit negative website effects with those few shoppers who show positive effects and thus derive key implications for research and practice.     

Improving Marketing's Contribution to New Product Development

In many firms, the marketing department plays a minor role in new product development (NPD). However, recent research demonstrates that marketing capabilities more strongly influence firm performance than other areas such as research and development. This finding underscores the importance of identifying relevant capabilities that can improve the position of marketing within the NPD process as part of the quest to improve innovation performance. However, thus far, it has remained unclear precisely how the marketing department can increase its influence on NPD to enhance a firm's innovation performance. The results of this study demonstrate that the relationship between marketing capabilities and innovation performance is generally mediated by the decision influence of marketing on NPD. In particular, both marketing research quality and the ability to translate customer needs into product characteristics serve to increase marketing's influence on NPD. This increased influence, in turn, positively contributes to overall firm innovation performance. Hence, these results show that in addition to having the appropriate marketing capabilities, the marketing department must achieve a status in which these capabilities can translate into performance implications.     

The Combination Strategy to Optimal Target Selection and Offer Segmentation in Direct Mail

The optimization of direct mail activities generally focuses separately on the issues of target selection and the selection of the strongest offer. In this paper we propose a combination strategy of the two practices through a response model which makes target selection specific to an offer. This combination strategy promises significantly higher profits than does the typical two-stage strategy.     

Decomposing the sales promotion bump accounting for cross-category effects

Extant research on the decomposition of unit sales bumps due to price promotions considers these effects only within a single product category. This article introduces a framework that accommodates specific cross-category effects. Empirical results based on daily data measured at the item/SKU level show that the effects of promotions on sales in other categories are modest. Between-category complementary effects (20%) are, on average, substantially larger than between-category substitution effects (11%). Hence, a promotion of an item has an average net spin-off effect of (20 − 11 =) 9% of its own effect. The number of significant cross-category effects is low, which means that we expect that, most of the time, it is sufficient to look at within-category effects only. We also find within-category complementary effects, which implies that competitive items within the category may benefit from a promotion. We find small stockpiling effects (6%), modest cross-item effects (22%), and substantial category-expansion effects (72%). The cross-item effects are the result of cross-item substitution effects within the category (26%) and within-category complementary effects (4%). Approximately 15% (= 11% / 72%) of the category-expansion effect is due to between-category substitution effects of dependent categories.     

Popularity of Brand Posts on Brand Fan Pages: An Investigation of the Effects of Social Media Marketing

Social media outlets constitute excellent vehicles for fostering relationships with customers. One specific way to do this is to create brand fan pages on social networking sites. Companies can place brand posts (containing videos, messages, quizzes, information, and other material) on these brand fan pages. Customers can become fans of these brand fan pages, and subsequently indicate that they like the brand post or comment on it. This liking and commenting on brand posts reflects brand post popularity. In this article, we determine possible drivers for brand post popularity. We analyze 355 brand posts from 11 international brands spread across six product categories.Results show that positioning the brand post on top of the brand fan page enhances brand post popularity. But the findings also indicate that different drivers influence the number of likes and the number of comments. Namely, vivid and interactive brand post characteristics enhance the number of likes. Moreover, the share of positive comments on a brand post is positively related to the number of likes. The number of comments can be enhanced by the interactive brand post characteristic, a question. The shares of both positive and negative comments are positively related to the number of comments. Managers of brands that operate brand fan pages can be guided by our research with regards to deciding which characteristics or content to place at brand posts.